There was a disappointing number of compelling personalities in ITV
documentary Inside Asprey, says Benjamin Secher

Minutes into ITV’s slight fly-on the-wall documentary Inside Asprey: Luxury by Royal Appointment, it became clear that the 200-year-old Bond Street jewellers is a place where the traditional upstairs-downstairs dynamic of upper-class England is turned on its head.

Here, in “the epitome of British luxury goods”, the super-rich swan around below stairs on the shop floor, perusing such bare necessities as a £4.6 million diamond ring and a £55,000 gorilla-shaped safe. Upstairs, craftsmen stretch blobs of platinum into necklace wire or beat silver into pussycat-shaped peppermills. “It’s not the nicest job,” said one jeweller. “But it keeps the bills at bay.”

There was something pleasingly unguarded about the way the Asprey employees spoke to the camera. One, while fixing the seat on the staff toilet, admitted that he used to work as a silversmith but became the caretaker after the company reduced its workforce. Another confessed that whenever a wealthy customer entered the shop, he would try to guess how much they planned to spend, then “get quite disappointed if it’s less than £10,000”. But nowhere among them did we meet the kind of charismatic or compellingly atrocious personality that this type of documentary demands.

Asprey is not the sort of establishment whose clientele like to be peered at by flies on walls so, standing in for the shop’s entire A-list fanbase, Samuel L Jackson – film star and owner of a silver Asprey gorilla – was offered up not once, but twice. When a Saudi princess came knocking, the cameras were turned off altogether.

Drama was sought where there was none, as the show homed in on some hideous bespoke handbags, priced at £30,000 a pop, which the shop was struggling to shift, perhaps because they were hideous. “The private handbag collection is underperforming,” intoned Downton Abbey’s Jim Carter, investing his voice-over with the kind of heart-tugging gravitas usually reserved for charity appeals. Frankly, it was hard to care: not all that glitters is documentary gold.